[You may use this image without prior permission
for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the
photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or
cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]

A reprise of the party animosity at the Eatanswill
election, which Pickwick attended in ch. 13, appears in this altercation
and subsequent physical battle between the editors of the Tory ("Blue")
and Whig ("Buff") journals for the town, Pott and Slurk, who by chance
arrive by separate carriages at The Saracen's Head, Towchester, just after
heavy rain has forced the Pickwick party travelling from Birmingham to London
to pull in for a change of horses and some refreshment. Everyone invovled has
gone into the kitchen because that is the only room at the coaching inn with a
roaring fire. Although Dickens accords the medical students some prominence in
the scene as they hope to bleed the antagonists, in Phiz's illustration Bob
Sawyer and Ben Allen are incidental to the action, Bob being the cigar-smoker
carrying a basin and lancet (left). Ineffectually, the landlady (right) is
endeavouring to clean up the mess the adversaries have made in her kitchen,
domestic chaos being signified by overturned chair and two overturned
stools. The
landlord (rear, centre) raises his hands in dismay at the damage. The centre
of the action is, of course, the hapless Mr. Pickwick, being assaulted by the
political adversaries.

Passage illustrated:

"I consider you, sir,' said Mr. Pott, moved by this
sarcasm, "I consider you a viper. I look upon you, sir, as a man who has
placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious,
disgraceful, and abominable public conduct. I view you, sir, personally
and politically, in no other light than as a most unparalleled and
unmitigated viper."/p>

The indignant Independent did not wait to hear the end of
this personal denunciation; for, catching up his carpet-bag, which was
well stuffed with movables, he swung it in the air as Pott turned away,
and, letting it fall with a circular sweep on his head, just at that
particular angle of the bag where a good thick hairbrush happened to be
packed, caused a sharp crash to be heard throughout the kitchen, and
brought him at once to the ground.

Uttering these incoherent exclamations, Mr. Pickwick
rushed between the infuriated combatants just in time to receive the
carpet-bag on one side of his body, and the fire-shovel on the other.
Whether the representatives of the public feeling of Eatanswill were
blinded by animosity, or (being both acute reasoners) saw the advantage
of having a third party between them to bear all the blows, certain it
is that they paid not the slightest attention to Mr. Pickwick, but
defying each other with great spirit, plied the carpet-bag and the
fire-shovel most fearlessly. Mr. Pickwick would unquestionably have
suffered severely for his humane interference, if Mr. Weller, attracted
by his master's cries, had not rushed in at the moment, and, snatching
up a meal — sack, effectually stopped the conflict by drawing it
over the head and shoulders of the mighty Pott, and clasping him tight
round the shoulders.

Michael Steig briefly notes how Samuel Pickwick in league with the
proletarian Samuel Weller, the two extremes, as it were, of the broad
middle class rout the forces of misrule — ironically identified
with Britain's warring political factions — whereas in the first
October illustration, "Bob Sawyer's Mode of Travelling," anarchic
forces (as embodied in the Dionysiac Bob) have temporarily gotten the
better of Pickwick, and of the episodic storyline:

The accompanying plate, "The Rival Editors" (ch. 51),
finds both Pickwick and Sam on the side of order, interfering in the
absurd conflict between the editors and ignoring the medical students
who circle them, brandishing their scalpels. This is the last broadly
comic episode in the novel, and can be seen as a resolution, a laying to
rest of the early Pickwick, as he and Sam have the advantage over the
ridiculous comic characters, and only the medical students suggest any
continuation of Misrule (a term I have taken from traditional Christmas
festivities. . . ). [36-37]

From his superior position on the china hutch Sam Weller comes to
the aid of his master by placing a meal sack over the head of The Eatanswill
Gazette editor Pott, who favours the "Blues" or
Tories. Effectively, then, Pickwick has nothing to fear from Pott's
fire-shovel,
but is still being buffeted by the carpet-bag wielded by the recently arrived
Slurk, editor of the Eatanswill Independent,
the "Buff"
or Liberal-leaning periodical for an East Anglian town, probably based
on Sudbury,
which Dickens visited as a young reporter covering a byelection in 1834.